"Does it live up to the long wait? YOU BET IT DOES!"

After years of development and a number of delays Brute Force finally arrived. I picked it popped it in and started playing. Its jumped me right into the action. You start as Tex, a heavy gunner, on a small mission more like a tutorial telling you what to do. As you progress you pick up 3 other squad members which i'll tell you about later. Brute Force is a tactical squad based third person shooter. It lets you command one for 4 squad member which you can change to one the fly with a click of a button. So basically all of your member of the squads are clones, so if you die, your re-cloned. Cool eh' Each member has his or her strong and weak points. Here are the four members.

Tex- A heavy Gunner, loves big guns and dispises small pistols and light arms. For his special, he can go into berserker mode and charge into battle with both of his guns blazing.

Brutus- he is the second member added tot he squad. Hes a lizard type thing called a Feral. He, like Tex, also like bigger weapons. But his special is the ability to see things other cant, like night vision. Brutus can also charge and kill enemies.

Hawk- The third member of the team, and also the scout. She is straight stealth and is always ahead checking stuff out. Her special isthe ability to cloak, she then enters stealth mode and can sneak up on enemies and cut them open with her blade.

Flint- The fourth member of Brute Force. She is more of a cyborg not a human (Or lizard). shes a sniper and always stays back or looks for the vantage point. Her special, when activated, lets her automatically target things. Like an auto-aim.

GRAPHICS- Superb, the first level you start in you see cliffs and long blades of grass everywhere. The bump-mapping is everywhere and it gives everything that realistic look. The environments and everything in them look sharp with no jaggies and are filled with detail. The character models are amazing, each has facial expressions and clear detail on their body. with only a few very small issues the graphics look amazing. 9/10

CONTROLS-Well, i told myself i wouldn't compare Brute Force to Halo in this review but this is where they are very similar. The controls are basically clones of Halo. A for jump X for reload etc etc. The B button brings down a menu in the bottom right in a Metal Gear Solid-esque fashion, you scroll through what you want and you use L to use it. Black is a quick command for health kits (Which come in handy.)The white button lets you enter your special ability mode. If you liked Halo's controls you'll fall in love with these.The D-Pad is used to change characters, Up for Tex, Down for Brutus, Left for Hawk, and Right for Flint. If you hold a direction you can give that member commands. I.E. If i hold Up for Tex, i can tell him cover me by pressing A. By the way, you can play inverted or southpaw or any way you wanted, for all you leftys out there. 10/10

SOUND- This is where the game shines (well another place it does). The sound is amazing, i'll start with the music. Technotronic did the whole soundtrack which means its got some goods beats. The music plays when your in a heated situation and its usually a fast beat song helping to keep you pumped up for play. At other times, like in one of the swamp levels, there is a low scary sounding song playing. The music is done very nicely. Ok, now the sound effects, they are outrageous!!! The sounds of the guns are right on target (No pun intended....lol) the explosions of the frags and other grenades sounds very good, and suck things as water and waves splashing on rocks sounds just like it should. All the characters have a voice and the voice acting is A+ the voices fir the characters perfect. All in all, i had no complaint with he sounds they are perfect, and if you pay attention while playing you can hear squadmates say some funny things or tell you they're under fire. The sound is incredible 10/10

Gameplay- Another place where this game just absolutely shines! From the start, your dropped into a mission as Tex, this mission is basically a tutorial, they walk you through everything tell you how to shoot and throw 'nades etc. Everything you do is very fluid, from shooting to running, to blasting a dead marine and watching him roll around due to the rag-doll physics. The game controls like a FPS and thats what it plays like too. When your shooting a gun you get this feeling of how strong the gun is, when your in beserker with Tex blazing 2 guns you juts dont want it to end. Its that fun. Things like sniping play a big role in the game, and its done very well in a Halo fashion. You zoom in and pop the gun and watch is body roll down a cliff. The A.I. helps to make the Gameplay alot better. The AI is great, it will duck under cover, run from fire, charge at you, roll from a grenade, yell to other members and so forth. When controlling the whole squad you can each person what to do. Like i said above you hold the direction that corresponds with which charcater you want to give a command, and you press a button. B for fire at will, A for cover me, Y for stand ground, and X for move to a disignated place. If you want you can give orders to the whole squad or just half of it by selecting them form the D-pad when your in the command window (after you select someone). One more cool feature is the ability to collect DNA for characters in muliplayer. There is DNA hidde in every level and it unlocks new people to play with for multiplay. Gameplay is great and i havent had any problems, eveything is done well and its very very fun, i dont want to stop playing. 10/10

Multiplayer- This is the beef of the game. Not only is there deathmatch, there is 4 player co-op. You can do connect up to 4 XBoxes and play 1 of three modes. Campaign (one person per box) Deathmatch, which supports 8 players and squad deathmatch which is: each player gets a 4 man squad and you go against eachother. You can do 4 player co-op on one box is you wnat or 3 players on one box and one on the other box. How ever you wnat to do it. The ability to download new content online over XBox Live will keep multiplayer fresh. The deathmatch is really fun and there are plenty of options to choose from. The multiplayer isnt perfect though, there is only a small number of maps, and its lacking some game modes like CTF. Hopefully all this will be downloadable on Live. The multplayer experience so far has been really good. Ive played 3 player co-op on one box with no slowdown which is also a good sign. Though the multplayer could have had a few more features it was still comparable to Halo, very fast and very fun. 9/10

Replayability- I thought i was just going to want to play through this game once and then play multiplayer deathmatch the rest but that wasnt the case. Ive played the first 6-7 levels almost 3 times, and everytime it just got better. There are so many ways to complete levels, you can stay low and snipe or charge in, guns blazing. This adds to the replay value. Also because you can go through and play co-op with 3 friends it makes it alot more fun. The multplayer was just as fun as Halo's is, you just don't want to put down the controller, though i havent played it for more then an hour, it was a blast. This game is very long too about 20 hours the first time though and probably longer on the hardest mode, Brutal. All in all, the replay value is very high, you can play single player by yourself a few times then with friends. I'm sure i'll be putting in countless hours og deathmatch pretty soon. 9/10

Brute Force is an amazing game and ranks right up there with Halo i recommend this game as a must-have for any XBox owner. Skip the rental go buy it now!!!